‘Very lucky,’ said Helen, ‘you would have made him quite miserable.’ When she spoke of him her face grew tender, content. It was a maternal contentment: like a warm-hearted and dutiful child, he gave her almost all she desired.
Margaret smiled back at her, and for a second I thought I saw in her face a longing for just such a contentment, just such a home; ordered, settled, the waiting fire, the curtains drawn against the night.
‘It wouldn’t have been my sort of thing,’ she said.
It was at this moment that I felt my talk with Betty, which had left me in such a glow, had suddenly touched a trigger and released a surge of sadness and self-destruction.
It seemed like another night, drinking with Betty, going home to Sheila — not a special night, more like many nights fused together, with nothing waiting for me but Sheila’s presence.
That night lay upon this. I was listening to Margaret and Helen, my limbs were heavy, for an instant I felt in one of those dreams where one is a spectator but cannot move.
When Margaret had talked, earlier that evening, of the children her sister wanted, she was repeating what she had told me before; and, just as before, she was holding something back.
I had thought, when I saw them together in that room half an hour before, that, unlike in so much, they were alike in taking their own way. But they were alike at one other point. It was not only Helen who longed for children; Margaret was the same. Once we had spoken of it, and from then on, just as tonight, she held back. She did not wish me to see how much she looked forward to her children. If she did let me see it, it would lay more responsibility upon me.
Listening to them, I felt at a loss with Helen because she was confident I should make her sister happy.
When she got up to go, I said how much I had enjoyed the evening. But Margaret had been watching me: after seeing her sister to the door, she returned to the empty sitting-room and looked at me with concern.
‘What is the matter?’ she said.
I was standing up. I took her in my arms and kissed her. Over her head, past the folding doors, I could see the bed and the windows beyond, lit up by the afterglow in the west. With an effort, disproportionately great, I tried to throw off the heaviness, and said: ‘Isn’t it time we talked too?’
‘What about?’
‘We ought to talk about us.’
She stood back, out of my arms, and looked at me. Her eyes were bright but she hesitated. She said: ‘You don’t want to yet.’
I went on: ‘We can’t leave it too long.’
For an instant her voice went high.
‘Are you sure you’re ready?’
‘We ought to talk about getting married.’
It was some instants before she spoke, though her eyes did not leave me. Then her expression, which had been grave, sharp with insight, suddenly changed: her face took on a look of daring, which in another woman might have meant the beginning of a risky love affair.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I want you. But I want you in your freedom.’
That phrase, which we had just picked up, she used to make all seem more casual to us both. But she was telling me how much she knew. She knew that, going about in high spirits, I still was not safe from remorse, or perhaps something which did not deserve that name and which was more like fear, about Sheila. That misery had made me morbidly afraid of another; Margaret had more than once turned her face away to conceal the tears squeezing beneath her eyelids, because she knew that at the sight of unhappiness I nowadays lost confidence altogether.
She accepted that, just as she accepted something else, though it was harder. It was that sometimes I did not have fear return to me with the thought of Sheila, but joy. Cheated by memory, I was transported to those times — which had in historical fact been negligible in the length of our marriage — when Sheila, less earthbound than I was, had lifted me off the earth. Cheated by memory, I had sometimes had that mirage-joy, the false-past, shine above a happy time with Margaret, so that the happiness turned heavy.
She knew all that; but what she did not know was whether I was getting free. Was I capable of a new start, of entering the life she wanted? Or was I a man who, in the recesses of his heart, manufactured his own defeat? Searching for that answer, she looked at me with love, with tenderness, and without mercy for either of us.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, putting her arms round me, ‘there’s plenty of time.’
She muttered, her head against my chest: ‘I’m not very patient, you know that now, don’t you? But I will be.’
Below my eyes her hair was smooth; the window had darkened quickly in the past minutes; I was grateful to her.
21: The Acquiescent Versus the Opaque
THROUGH the spring and summer, the Minister had been able to go on stalling with Paul Lufkin. The Barford project had run into a blind alley, it looked likely that there would be no development in England, and nothing for the industrialists to do. All of which was true and reasonable, and Lufkin could only accept it; but he was alert when, in the autumn, a new rumour went round. It was that a fresh idea had sprung up at Barford, which some people, including Bevill himself, wanted to invest in.
As usual, Lufkin’s information was something near accurate. None of us was certain whether Barford would be saved or the scientists sent to America, but in October the struggle was going on; and while we were immersed in it, Lufkin did not visit the Minister again but out of the blue invited me to dinner.
When I received that note, which arrived a week before the decision over Barford was to be made, I thought it would be common prudence to have a word with Hector Rose, So, on an October morning, I sat in the chair by his desk. Outside the window, against a windy sky, the autumn leaves were turning. Even by his own standards Hector Rose looked spruce and young that day — perhaps because the war news was good, just as in the summer there had been days when, tough as he was, he had sat there with his lips pale and his nostrils pinched. The flower bowl was always full, whatever the news was like; that morning he had treated himself to a mass of chrysanthemums.
‘Well, my dear Eliot,’ he was saying, ‘it’s very agreeable to have you here. I don’t think I’ve got anything special, but perhaps you have? I’m very glad indeed to have the chance of a word.’ I mentioned Lufkin’s invitation. In a second the flah-flah dropped away — and he was listening with his machine-like concentration. I did not need to remind him that I had, not so long ago, been a consultant for Lufkin, nor that Gilbert Cooke had been a full-time employee. Those facts were part of the situation; he was considering them almost before I had started, just as he was considering Lufkin’s approaches to the Minister.
‘If our masters decide to persevere with Barford’ — Rose spoke as though some people, utterly unconnected with him, were choosing between blue or brown suits: while he was totally committed on Barford’s side, and if the project survived he would be more responsible, after the scientists, than any single man — ‘if they decide to persevere with it, we shall have to plan the first contact straightaway, that goes without saying.
‘We shall have to decide,’ added Rose coldly, ‘whether it is sensible to bring Lufkin in.’
He asked: ‘What’s your view, Eliot? Would it be sensible?’
‘So far as I can judge, it’s rather awkward,’ I said. ‘His isn’t obviously the right firm — but it’s not out of the question.’
‘Exactly,’ said Rose. ‘This isn’t going to be an easy one.’